Mobile

I get emails all the time from odd email addresses claiming to offer ‘SEO services’. More recently though the emails i’ve been receiving have taken a more focussed attempt to question whether my site is mobile friendly.

The reason for this, just in case you didn’t know, is likely because on Tuesday 20th April 2015 Google decided to place a requirement on sites to be mobile friendly! Well, it’s not a requirement as far as your site will continue to work, but by not having a mobile friendly site your SEO rankings will be hampered and your search result rankings will drop!

For more information on what this is all about and for the official scoop direct from Google, you can check Google’s official announcement here. It’s a bit wordy and long-winded, so I’ve summarised the key points below for you below…

What do I need to do to become Mobile Friendly?

If you use the testing tool and find you’re not meeting the requirements to be deemed ‘Optimised for Mobile’ then you can also read some of the guidelines here on the WebMaster Blog. Just to give you the highlights though, the post says of optimising your site:

A page is eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria as detected by Googlebot:

Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash

Uses text that is readable without zooming

Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom

Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped

If you want to make sure that your page meets the mobile-friendly criteria:

Check your pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test

Read our updated documentation on our Webmasters Mobile Guide on how to create and improve your mobile site

See the Mobile usability report in Google Webmaster Tools, which highlights major mobile usability issues across your entire site, not just one page

Check our how-to guide for third-party software like WordPress or Joomla, in order to migrate your website hosted on a CMS (Content Management System) to use a mobile-friendly template

We see these labels as a first step in helping mobile users to have a better mobile web experience. We are also experimenting with using the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal.

There are a whole host of other tips and advice on mobile-optimising your site, just head on over to Google’s dedicated micro-site to find out all about this thing!